Title

Is Encodo a .NET/C# company?

Description

Encodo has never been about maintaining or establishing a monoculture in either operating system, programming language or IDE. Pragmatism drives our technology and environment choices.<fn><h>Choosing technology</h>
Each project we work on has different requirements and we choose the tools and technologies that fit best. A good fit involves considering:
<ul>
What exists in the project already?
How much work needs to be done?
What future directions could the project take?
How maintainable is the solution/are the technologies?
How appropriate are various technologies?
What do our developers know how to do best?
What do the developers who will maintain the project know best? What are they capable of?
Is there framework code available that would help?
</ul><h>History: Delphi and Java</h>
When we started out in 2005, we'd also spent years writing frameworks and highly generic software. This kind of software is not really a product per se, but more of a highly configurable programmable "engine", in which other programmers would write their actual end-user applications.
A properly trained team can turn around products very quickly using this kind of approach. It is not without its issues, though: maintaining a framework involves a lot of work, especially producing documentation, examples and providing support. While this is very interesting work, it can be hard to make lucrative, so we decided to move away from this business and focus on creating individual products.
Still, we stuck to the programming environment and platform that we knew best<fn> (and that our customers were requesting): we developed software mostly in Delphi for projects that we already had.<fn> For new products, we chose Java.
Why did we choose Java as our "next" language? Simply because Java satisfied a lot of the requirements outlined above. We were moving into web development and found Delphi's offerings lacking, both in the IDE as well as the library support. So we moved on to using Eclipse with Jetty. We evaluated several common Java development libraries and settled on Hibernate for our ORM and Tapestry for our web framework (necessitating HiveMind as our IOC).
<h>History: .NET</h>
A few years later, we were faced with the stark reality that developing web applications on Java (at the time) was fraught with issues, the worst of which was extremely slow development-turnaround times. We found ourselves incapable of properly estimating how long it would take to develop a project. We accept that this may have been our fault, of course, but the reality was that (1 )we were having trouble making money programming Java and (2) we weren't having any fun anymore.
We'd landed a big project that would be deployed on both the web and Windows desktops, with an emphasis on the Windows desktop clients. At this point, we needed to reŽvaluate: such a large project required a development language, runtime and IDE strong on the Windows Desktop. It also, in our view, necessitated a return to highly generic programming, which we'd moved away from for a while.
Our evaluation at the time included Groovy/Grails/Gtk, Python/Django/Gtk, Java/Swing/SWT/Web framekworks, etc. We made the decision based on various factors (tools, platform suitability, etc.) and moved to .NET/C# for developing our metadata framework Quino, upon which we would build the array of applications required for this big project.
<h>Today (2014)</h>
We're still developing a lot of software in C# and .NET but also have a project that's built entirely in Python.<fn> We're not at all opposed to a suggestion by a customer that we add services to their Java framework on another project, because that's what's best there.
We've had some projects that run on a Linux/Mono stack on dedicated hardware. For that project, we made a build-server infrastructure in Linux that created the embedded OS with our software in it.
Most of our infrastructure runs on Linux with a few Windows VMs where needed to host or test software. We use PostgreSql wherever we can and MS-SQL when the customer requires it.<fn>
We've been doing a lot of web projects lately, which means the usual client-side mix of technology (JS/CSS/HTML). We use jQuery, but prefer Knockout for data-binding. We've evaluated the big libraries---Angular, Backbone, Ember---and found them to be too all-encompassing for our needs.
We've evaluated both Dart and TypeScript to see if those are useful yet. We've since moved to TypeScript for all of our projects but are still keeping an eye on Dart.
We use LESS instead of pure CSS. We've used SCSS as well, but prefer LESS. We're using Bootstrap in some projects but find it to be too restrictive, especially where we can use Flexbox for layout on modern browsers.
And, with the web comes development, support and testing for iOS and other mobile devices, which to some degree necessitates a move from pure .NET/C# and toward a mix.
We constantly reŽvaluate our tools, as well. We use JetBrains WebStorm instead of Visual Studio for some tasks: it's better at finding problems in JavaScript and LESS. We also use PhpStorm for our corporate web site, including these blogs. We used the Java-based Jenkins build server for years but moved to JetBrains TeamCity because it better supports the kind of projects we need to build.
<h>Conclusion</h>
The description above is meant to illustrate flexibility, not chaos. We are quite structured and, again, pragmatic in our approach.
Given the choice, we tend to work in .NET because we have the most experience and supporting frameworks and software for it. We use .NET/C# because it's the best choice for many of the projects we have, but we are most definitely not a pure Microsoft development shop.
I hope that gives you a better idea of Encodo's attitude toward software development.
<hr><ft>If it's not obvious, we employ the <i>good</i> kind of pragmatism, where we choose the best tool for the job and the situation, not the <i>bad</i> kind, founded in laziness and unwillingness to think about complex problems. Just so we're clear.</ft><ft>Remo had spent most of his career working with Borland's offerings, whereas I had started our with Borland's Object Pascal before moving on to the first version of Delphi, then Microsoft C++ and MFC for many years. After that came the original version of ASP.NET with the "old" VB/VBScript and, finally, back to Delphi at Opus Software.</ft><ft>We were actually developing on Windows using Delphi and then deploying on Linux, doing final debugging with Borland's Linux IDE, Kylix. The software to be deployed on Linux was headless, which made it much easier to write cross-platform code.</ft><ft>For better or worse; we inherited a Windows GUI in Python, which is not very practical, but I digress</ft><ft>Which is almost always, unfortunately.</ft>